I was fiddling with something similar to your GameObject per bone idea while looking into physics integration. Was just wondering how you have decided to render the skeleton in this setup. Are you creating separate quad meshes and MeshRenderers/MeshFilters for each of the GameObjects and relying on dynamic batching to reduce the draw calls, or are you skinning all GameObjects under a Skinned Mesh Renderer after assigning bones to updated GameObject positions while having those bones influence the various quads? If so, how have you solved Z sorting between the different submeshes on different GameObjects forming the skinned mesh, or on the seperate quads implementation mentioned first.

Or have you simply created an API for exposing the bones as GameObjects so you can attach things to them (rendering duties still left to the existing rendering code written by Nate). If it is the latter, and it is robust and minimal overhead when disabled for those that don't want (single bool to check to enable and look to update GameObjects per frame), I would vote for integration, as quite a few people seem to have rolled their own solutions desiring this functionality. While trying to do the Physics stuff I tried to think about some edge cases that you may also want to consider. Mainly, I believe you should not destroy GameObjects that have been created by the system to match bones. If a bone no longer exists due to them being renamed or removed from an animation when a new .json version is imported you do not want the user to lose the scripts they have attached to the now defunct GameObject. If a rename occurred for example, then you should simply disable the GameObject and Log a warning stating that the bone no longer exists in the animation, maybe asking if you should recycle the GameObject for a different (new) bone (just update GameObject to have new name). Worst case, you create the new GameObject for the renamed bone and allow the user to manually copy across their scripts/components with all variables intact before they delete it manually forever. Then it is on the user not to lose their scripts. You can see that the main issue with such a system is that you have to take care not to destroy scripts or attachments that people have set and all the public variables or configuration they may have populated through the inspector. Also, for attaching colliders take a look at the Physics integration I started just in case it may be of some help to you. It takes care of creating/updating Bounding box colliders and disabling/enabling on required frames. It also at least allows you to override if a collider should be displayed or if you want to put you own custom one on there too (box collider).
If you have all of the above checked off then this will be pretty useful to a lot of people.
Link.

Regards,

Rob

Thanks for the input, Rob!

CoryGold a écrit

//Nate
Well I did use C# BinaryReader in the beggining but it has some issues because the way Java handles UTF-8 Strings & Primitives, On that documentation it shows whats different. I'm still going to figure this out even if it will just be changed when you add meshes. I'm personally curios and I really want to figure this out for the sake of added knowledge I might receive from figuring it out.

Fair enough. You can treat MUTF-8 as UTF-8, no need to do anything special. Eg:
http://stackoverflow.com/a/1393579
BinaryReader should be able to read strings and primitives, though I admit I've never tried it. 8) Wait, I forgot I implement my own string format which optimizes for ASCII. No wonder BinaryReader couldn't read it! Sorry. You'll need to implement the readInt and readString methods here:
https://github.com/libgdx/libgdx/blob/m ... Input.java
BinaryReader should handle the rest.

Then could you think about Bson?

BSON makes parsing easier, but loses a lot of the benefit of a binary format. It would still write names for the values. Eg, JSON would be "{name:value}" and BSON would be roughly "{Si4nameSi5value}". The SkeletonBinary format writes only the minimal amount of data and in a known order, so is most efficient but slightly harder to parse.

When the new skeleton Component runs it will create bone Components and a Gameobject for each bone and attach the bone to the Component. The bone Component then updates itself to the spot where the bone is.

This is an interesting way to do it. To be clear, you would create a GameObject for each bone, allowing the user to easily attach things to a bone? Probably would be good to only create GameObject for bones that the user cares about. Actually, instead of creating GameObjects automatically, maybe it would make most sense to make a "BoneComponent" that is wired up to a SkeletonComponent and lets the user pick a bone. The BoneComponent can be attached to any GameObject and will adjust its transform to match the skeleton bone.

Nate, I think you hit the nail on the head with that final implementation idea. Would be very easy for users to configure bones and attachments that way, perhaps through a drop down list of the bones in a skeleton shown in an editor script on the new bone component. I feel like it would be very flexible too, you could in theory change which bone a GameObject/BoneComponent is following/snapping to at runtime if you really wanted to! You could also have user configurable information within the BoneComponent to state whether it should draw Bounding Boxes if they are a child attachment, house a custom collider, whether these colliders are disabled via the animation at the right frames, or whether to override this behaviour entirely. Sounds very cool.

CoryGold a écrit

I actually wrote a piggy-back class/Component for Spine.Bone and it is used by a special SkeletonComponent so people can choose not to use it.... Its still drawn under one mesh Comp(The base SkeletonComponent) though... For performance I could attach points to the bone object. When the new skeleton Component runs it will create bone Components and a Gameobject for each bone and attach the bone to the Component. The bone Component then updates itself to the spot where the bone is. I'm going to write facilities to change the scale,Position and even rotation via the bone Component eventually(Half implemented)... Working out how to do the rest might be a confusing effort. Maybe move the mesh points for the bone? and not the bone itself... So the user can flop from animated to not animated via bone comp.

Is the above have the same functionality as Nate described? I'm not following some parts, like here

For performance I could attach points to the bone object.

I'm not sure what you mean by points? And is the bone object you are referring to the GameObject, or is it a Unity bone? If it uses a Unity bone, would it not just be easier to update the transform of the GameObject rather that the Bone component? Or is this more overhead? Or am I getting completely confused... :bang:

Anyway, looking forward to this, I think it could be really flexible and super useful! Thanks CoryGold for all your efforts

Regards

Rob

Aha! I think I follow now, thanks for the explanation. So to be sure though, what you have created can actually affect the skeleton being rendered. If I update the skeleton which updates my BoneComponent, then move my BoneComponent, it will move vertices associated with that bone. What about other bones that are children of that bone, will they be affected too, or only if you have further BoneComponent created which point to those bones? I'm guessing if you force all bones to be built you would have ended up with a nice hierarchy of parent and child bones as parent and child GameObjects. What about now that you can specify some bones and not others? How will the hierarchy be organised, if at all (BoneComponents could now potentially sit happily outside of the skeleton GameObject, you could even do something seriously stoopid, like make the skeleton a child of one of its own bones).

Also, does all this require using Skinned Mesh Renderers in order to work, as this will break dynamic batching between multiple skeletons using the same atlas, which may be a consideration for some people who have managed to batch multiple enemies, etc on screen, by not using multiple materials. If so could there be a system to batch multiple skinned meshes that share the same material and still preserve all of their individual functionality/animations? I'm just wondering how you reference to the mesh vertices you wanted to alter or if you assigned bones with weights in order to do the movement.

Was actually thinking of writing an implementation of SkeletonComponent that uses Skinned Mesh Renderers and Unity bones in order to perform the animation. But then FFD is coming in (which would be compatible) but Skinning I believe would to be almost like an FFD override (meaning you would still have alter mesh vertices each frame) rendering it kinda pointless. Doubt there is much in the performance differences though?

Again looking forward to having a hands on play so I can make further evaluations/suggestions. Rob

I'm not sure about the BoneComponent driving the skeleton, but it might be interesting. To start I think it is best to keep it simple, a BoneComponent that adjusts the GameObject it is attached to using a bone from a skeleton. Task:
https://trello.com/c/RWIT6WQd/59-boneco ... spine-tk2d

Looks cool!

You probably want to store the bone name in the BoneComponent and then look up the bone as needed, caching if possible. You'll have to handle if the skeleton is recreated, which is probably why you lose your selection when you press play.

TBH, probably the only thing I'd merge, at least at first, is a BoneComponent that is created manually, has a way to choose a SkeletonComponent and a bone, and updates its transform to match the bone. This is the simplest thing possible and we can build on the complexity from there.

Should read a varint that is the number of vertices in the mesh, then read that many floats.

Saw your PR, thanks. May be some time before I can get to it, want to get animating meshes done!

Hi!
I've made simple component called "BonnesAttachment", that allows attach GameObject to submesh center. This object moves with animation so you can attach colliders or whatever you want to it
Link to unitypackage: https://www.dropbox.com/s/cjndt6r2klusk ... itypackage